October 21, 2004
Vogue nanny wins $2.2m after fur attack error
From James Bone in New York
THE anti-fur campaigners who splattered red paint on Anna Wintour’s doorstep in New York’s Greenwich Village were aiming to save animals.
Instead, the attack on the longtime British editor of American Vogue left her live-in nanny suffering “severe and permanent neurological injuries”.
Now Lori Feldt, 31, who was overcome by toxic fumes from the chemicals used to clean up the paint, is to receive a $2.2 million (£1.2 million) pay-out after taking the case to court. Seven days into a trial that bared the private life of the fashion queen, Ms Feldt has agreed to settle her claim against the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast and the builder it hired to clean up the paint.
The settlement spares the frosty fashion queen, nicknamed Nuclear Wintour, from any further public embarrassment. She was not named as a defendant and will not be responsible for the damages.
Known for wearing sun-glasses at all hours, Ms Wintour, who has edited the publication since 1988, has been marked out as a “fur-hag” by animals welfare groups because of her unapologetic support for the use of fur in fashion.
A campaigner once put a dead racoon in her soup at the Four Seasons restaurant.
On December 2, 1997, a group calling itself the Paint Panthers spray-painted a trail of red paw-prints to her townhouse on Sullivan Street, ending in a pool of animal “blood" on the doorstep.
Ms Feldt testified that she passed out while workers sent by Condé Nast were cleaning it up. “The fumes were very, very strong,” she said. Her lawyers alleged that the cleaners used a paint thinner containing the toxic chemical toluene.
A maid arriving later in the day found her lying on the floor. Ms Wintour’s husband, David Shaffer, a renowned child psychologist at Columbia University, rushed home and took her to hospital in his car.
Ms Feldt said that she began to suffer from headaches, nausea, memory loss, numbness in her face and hands, and had trouble walking because of balance problems. Unable to perform her duties, she was laid off by Ms Wintour six months later and had to abandon plans to go to medical school.
Now living with her husband in Washington, Ms Feldt says she still has trouble caring for her son, aged 4. “I basically just feel really sad . . . I can’t be the mother I want to be, or the wife I want to be,” she testified.
In court papers, Ms Feldt said she was paid $325 a week for looking after the couple’s children, Bee and Charlie, then aged 12 and 10.
Waking at 5.30am, she served them breakfast so that Ms Wintour and her husband could drop them off at school when their chauffeured car arrived at seven o’clock.
Because of the couple’s glamorous social life, Ms Feldt and the children would often not see them again until the next morning. “I communicated with David and Anna mostly through a notebook,” she said in a deposition. Describing her relationship with Ms Wintour, she said: “She was aloof . . . but it was a pleasant relationship.”
Ms Wintour and Mr Shaffer, speaking through their lawyer, wished their former nanny and her family “the best in the future”.
Those anti-fur campaigners are so disrespectful! 
